by Kent, Julia
“Oh, Christ, Lydia. I’ll be there soon.” Click.
Luckily Krysta hadn’t said the one thing that Lydia feared hearing the most. You need to call your mother.
“What would Sandy do?” she muttered to herself, closing her mouth and reminding herself to stop doing this. What would Sandy do? Well Sandy, she guessed, would never have left Maine in the first place. She didn’t understand it. Grandma stayed in Boston – loved it in fact – and was just as stubborn as mom when it came to making life decisions. Lydia sure understood that.
Sandy had been devastated that Lydia didn’t stay in Maine with her brothers but she had no real future there. Not quite. That wasn’t really true. It wasn't that she had no future there, it was that she had Sandy and Pete’s future there. What they wanted. How they envisioned life for their kids. And her brothers all loved it, except for one.
She pushed the thought away. She couldn’t think about Luke right now. But she was the one who got away, and the only one not living there now. She was only four hours from home and Grandma lived in the same city. So, what was their problem? Why couldn't Sandy just be happy for her?
If she called Mom and said, “Hey, Mom, I went out last night and got drunk and made out with my boss, and by the way, it’s the third time and he has my panties from this elevator scene that...”
Words rolling off her tongue, Lydia tried to fathom the look on Sandy’s face, tried to imagine what her mother would think and do if she were Lydia. It didn't compute. She couldn't ask herself what would Sandy do? because Sandy would never have done any of this. A smile cracked the cotton balls in Lydia’s mouth.
That’s why she was here. Because, when she asked herself that question, what would Sandy do? the answer was Sandy would never find herself in this position. Lydia did, and this was Lydia’s life to live. But if Krysta didn’t hurry up, Lydia was going to die from caffeine deprivation.
Fortunately, a sharp knock on the door followed by the sound of a key in the lock and a holler told her her savior was here.
“You’re still in bed?” Krysta’s voice cut through the room like a sharp knife.
“Yeah, I'm still in bed. You’re my savior.” Clenched in Krysta’s hand was a telltale paper cup with a green logo on it. “Please tell me that’s a double.”
“It’s a triple.”
“Oh! Marry me.”
“No. It may be legal in this state, but no. I don’t marry people who give their panties to their boss in an elevator.”
“You’re never ever going to let me forget that are you?”
“I’m going to hold it over your head until the day you die.”
“Well, if you don’t give me that coffee right now, it’s going to be today.” The hot liquid, just the perfect temperature for taking small swallows, for infusing her brain with a much needed jolt, helped everything recede; her confusion, her thoughts about her mother, her feelings for Matt. She was one with the coffee and then she looked at Krysta and said, “Advil?”
Reaching into her purse, Krysta pulled out a bottle, shook out three orange pills and handed them to Lydia, who gulped them down in one big swallow. Now she could relax. Now she could give herself the time she needed to start this day because work – work was going to be really interesting today.
And it all started with coffee.
“Somebody got outed,” Lydia’s singsong voice made his blood run cold as he stepped off the elevator and looked at her in horror. His hair was dyed back to brown, he knew he was wearing the contact lenses because he’d seen himself in the mirror of the Toyota he rented as he drove to work this morning. So, what was she talking about?
“What are you talking about, Lydia?” he asked, on guard, standing close to the elevator and ready to jump back on it if need be.
“Dave,” she said slowly. “Dave.” Her face was radiant. She looked like a college student, a high school girl, a fresh faced ingenue who had just been handed the best news of her life. It didn't square with the half-drunk woman he'd left in bed last night. “Dave was fired. He is gone, completely gone.”
“Really?” Mike had to act surprised. He knew Dave was gone, because after digging through his HR file he discovered that Dave had falsified his resume. A few quick Google searches that Human Resources hadn’t bothered to do when they hired him seven years ago told him that Dave had a rather active life as an online liar. One phone call to Harvard told him that he certainly hadn’t eared his MBA there. With very little effort, he’d had him completely canned and offered a very neutral reference should Dave attempt to work elsewhere – in exchange for his speedy exit. He was beginning to dig this reality television show bit. It was helping him to find all sorts of information about his company.
And then there was Lydia. “So he’s gone.” He leaned in, face neutral, but voice intimate. “I want to talk about you, though. Not Dave.”
She blushed. “I, uh, don't know what to say. Um, thanks?” Her voice squeaked on the last word.
“For what?”
“For taking care of me.”
He coughed. “That's not quite how I remember it. You, my dear, were close to taking care of me.” He pointed to the office and as they walked, he realized this could be caught on camera if he wasn't very, very careful.
A crinkle in her nose as she winced made a part of him yearn to reach over and kiss her, though. Logic brain kicked in, though, and he changed the subject.
“I guess that means his job is open.”
His eyes lit on hers and she went completely ice queen on him. “Yes,” her jaw set a little crooked, as if tension had tightened her a little too quickly. “You’re right, Dave’s job is open.”
Her nearly instant turn on her heel and march back to her cubicle gave him a mouth watering view of her retreat. Of her ass in all its glory. Of the curves that he wished to touch once more. And then, he smiled, because he had an idea that might help everyone. Matt Jones was about to give Lydia her big break.
He followed her. As he walked around the wall of her cubicle he found her sitting at her desk, mumbling to herself and caught a few words. “Pompous...who does he think...acts like he owns...”
He suppressed a grin and cleared his throat so he didn’t scare her. She whipped around, her hair flying through the air and then floating over her left shoulder as she tipped her face toward him. “Oh.” She went from the vulnerability of her true emotions to the mask of professionalism. “Yes, Matt? What can I do for you?”
Oh, what can you do for me? he thought. “Uh, so...Lydia, with Dave gone, who is technically in charge?”
She bristled. “That would be you, Matt, until we have a new director. And above the Director of Communications we have Senior Vice President for Communications and Marketing.”
“I see.” Mike knew that that woman was perfectly capable but also out in San Francisco doing a multi-million dollar pitch for a new client. “Well, then, if I’m technically filling the position, I would like to ask you to continue your work on the romance project.”
The look on her face told him that this was the last thing she expected. “You...do?” she asked, her voice filled with incredulity. “But...why?”
He shrugged. “It’s a good idea and it deserves to be tried out.”
She recovered quickly. “How far do you want me to take it?”
They stared at each other, their breathing labored as he felt his skin prickle, his hands tighten, holding back from doing what he wanted to do which was take things very, very far with her. But in terms of the project...
“Uh, that’s a good question. I would have to look at the budget to see what we can approve but I think we're definitely looking at having you spend considerable work time on creating a full pitch, on contacting some of these bloggers, and video bloggers, and small eBook outlets, and the larger authors and smaller publishing houses you were talking about. Get them together to talk about some package advertising deals.”
She stood and smoothed her sweater over the swell of
her hips, and where her hands were – all he wanted to do was replace them with his. When she swallowed, he wanted his lips on the pulse at her neck and when she smiled he wanted to taste the way that her lips felt right now.
“Thank you,” she said. Her body leaned forward and then she halted herself, as if she were going to touch him. “Thank you. I appreciate the confidence.” Eyes narrowed as if she had a question she was about to ask, but then thought better of it. Instead, she added, “Can I email you some questions to bang out the specifics?”
That’s not what I want to bang out, he thought. “Absolutely,” he said, his mind warring with his solar plexus, with his thrumming heart, and with hands that were a little too untamed for his needs right now. “Absolutely. We’ll talk.” The words came out choked. He felt a cognitive and emotional dissonance that made it difficult to continue and so he didn’t, instead cutting the conversation off in mid word and walking away to find a stairwell to pound this out.
“I don’t know,” Lydia hissed into her phone, curled up in the supply closet. This was the last place that she wanted to be but it was the only quiet, dark little cubbyhole that she could find anywhere. Her office was teeming with too many people and the bathroom – lord! – the bathroom was gossip central. If somebody heard her in a stall whispering into her phone they’d assume she was pregnant or being cheated on or had some sort of a disease.
So, supply closet it was. The problem was that the room seemed infused with Matt’s scent. The darkness was reminiscent of his hands on her, his mouth claiming her, and the room seemed to get smaller and smaller, shrinking to envelop her and take her over even as Krysta screeched, “What do you think is happening, Lyd? Do you think he’s trying to screw you over?”
I think he’s trying to screw me, she thought, then took a deep, careful breath before answering with her actual mouth. “Umm...I don’t know. The idealist in me wants to think that he recognized a good idea, that he respects my intelligence, and that he wants me to explore this option to see if we can get the higher ups to sign off on it, and this is my ticket to becoming a director.”
“And the pessimist in you,” Krysta answered for her, “says that he just wants to get into your pants, steal your idea, take credit, and run away.”
“Pretty much,” Lydia said.
And then Krysta said the words that no one really wanted to hear, including Krysta. “Just like Dave did.”
Ouch. What Matt didn’t know was that Dave had come to the company years ago as a fresh- faced, just as unctuous and oily, upstart. In a position that was then called Communications Coordinator, and that he quickly got renamed and reclassified to Director of Communications.
Dave hadn’t worn his wedding ring when he had first started at Bounrham Industries. It wasn’t until after he and Lydia had gone out a few times, always to quiet, dark little places that were twenty blocks away from work, that he just had to share with her – these little gems deep in the city, far from prying eyes.
It wasn’t until she had come perilously close to giving herself to him, not so much emotionally but physically, that she had found out he was married.
That had ended it immediately. She wouldn’t aid anyone in cheating on their spouse, and even though she wasn’t in a committed relationship that didn’t mean that he was not. He seemed to have no problem, however, with violating his vows. When she’d called him on it he had simply smiled, looked at his fingernails, paused, bought himself a little bit of time and then said, “You’re really not my type anyhow.”
Lydia had spent the last year working under his thumb, fetching his damn lattes and trying to find a way to get a transfer out of there. The romance project had been a big part of that. With Dave gone, though, she had more options. Having Krysta bring up the past with Dave, though, made her cringe. Suddenly Matt’s scent flew out from under the small crack in the door, the tiny closet becoming a great, cold, white light abyss and all traces of intimacy in memory or in real life faded at her sense of outrage and shame.
Shame driven only by her own naivete. How she had let herself fall for so many different lines and for such a jerk like Dave was something that she just couldn’t understand and really couldn’t forgive herself for. But, she wasn’t going to focus on that right now and Krysta wasn’t going to make her.
“So,” she whispered, “the good news is that I’ve got another opportunity.”
“But Lyd, Matt has your job.”
“Yeah, but you know what? I bet Matt is gunning for Dave’s job and then I can have Matt’s job.”
“Matt’s been here a week Lydia – a week. You’ve been here for over two years. Why can’t you have Dave’s job?”
She went silent. How could she have – and then slowly Lydia began to bang her head against the metal shelving in front of her. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! How could she have missed it? Some part of her had become submissive, schoolgirl-like, giddy at scraps. And Matt Jones had been some sort of integral part of that.
“You’re right,” she told Krysta.
“I know.”
“And you’re modest.”
“Yeah, that too.”
“I need to go for the director’s job, which means Matt is no longer an ally. He’s the competition.”
“Mike, it’s Diane just calling to check in and see how you’re doing. You’ve been on my mind lately and I’ve been thinking a lot about you. Call me. You know where to find me.” Click.
He’d ignored the last three text messages from her and now she had resorted to voice mail. She must have some enormous event where she needed him on her arm. Why had he ever played this game?
Joanie had delivered about twenty-seven hours worth of work to his apartment and here he sat, on a Sunday, when most of his co-workers – no, Matt Jones’ co-workers – were catching up on errands or playing, going to the movies, hanging out with family.
Bleary eyed, already on his fourth cup of coffee and it was, he looked at the clock, 10:11 a.m. – he faced a day of dull work.
Diane. Just what he needed. Diane was a Kardashian wannabe, which Mike had found charming when he first met her. Not charming in a cute or an appealing sort of way, but charming in a ‘pat the woman's head in a condescending manner’ kind of way because if being a Kardashian were the height of Diane’s dreams then he’d hate to know what her nightmares were. As tux candy, she'd been fine, but just as she used him for status, he had used her for public relations.
As he stared at all of the work and all of the decisions that other people were afraid to make, choices that he was pushed against a wall to execute, he faced a growing sense that profits were not going to meet what he had hoped in order to achieve his coup. He felt himself simultaneously tightening and loosening, the drive to win so great, so overwhelming inside of him that he could not let go of the goal.
Something new, a release within him, was a counterweight to that burden of success.
It teased him like a Siren on the seas, calling out to him, offering a different view, another life. One with swells and soft curves and flesh that went on and invited his hands, his mouth, his heart. And that, right there, was the problem.
She was derailing him.
From that frantic kiss in the supply closet to a very unprofessional but succulent moment in the dark, in the elevator, Lydia invaded his thoughts, his fantasies – and his business.
To that night in the bar, taking her home, tucking her in, his decency the only protection from tipping over and going full on, full blood, full wild with her.
A less respectful man would have gone for it. A man with a killer instinct would have gone for it and, until a couple of weeks ago, Mike would have called himself the ultimate alpha male with a killer instinct that put would put him into the Fortune 500 and would eventually make him the CEO of a top-ten company.
Her panties were now tucked away in his glove compartment, never failing to bring a smile to his face whenever he saw them. Damn it.
Decency threatened everything. The de
cency that said Bournham Industries bonuses weren’t good enough. The decency that saw the impact of cheap paper towels and horrible coffee on the workers. The decency that kept his body from hers, from taking advantage of someone who was so dependent on him but didn’t realize it – her career, her self esteem, her emotional state so wrapped up in what she did at Bournham Industries and her personal state so wrapped up in this fictional character Matt Jones, that he had created. So much of Lydia intertwined with him.
And she was completely oblivious to it all and certainly had been with more alcohol coursing through her than ought to have been the case. It was her vulnerability that made him realize he had to withdraw. Yet he had to get back in touch with that killer instinct, because that killer instinct – that was what had gotten him into this mess in the first place.
He’d agreed to do Meet the Hidden Boss with Jonah because his killer instinct drove him to find ways to make new profits. His killer instinct drove him to date women like Diane because it got him on the socialite pages, into the newspapers, on social media sites, on TMZ and Perez and all the crazy places with his face here, there, and everywhere. Branding was something that guys with a killer instinct knew.
Decency? Decency had no place when it came to branding.
What he needed to do was go back to being that guy who tapped on her glass, who met her that first day, that guy she joked – or didn’t joke – was trying to be Christian Grey. Mike might not have been a billionaire yet, but he was going to be.
Lydia was the only thing standing in the way.
The script was already sitting on his desk before he’d had a chance to take off his coat. The smack of the thick packet of papers hitting the surface as he whirled around to find Jonah standing there, back against the wall, trying hard not to be noticed filled the air.
In a twelve-by-fifteen office, it wasn’t easy to hide.
“Hey there, Mike. Good morning. I thought I’d catch you kind of early.” His hands out in a gesture of supplication, Jonah clearly had an agenda but was trying to act like he didn’t.
